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What’s the big deal about years of experience in a language?

in career, development

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A while ago I was wasting time on reddit, as you do, and came across an interesting question: “why do employers and just about everyone else make a big deal about language-specific positions and “what language should I learn”, etc.?” The greater context there was that the asker had a pretty easy time picking up new object oriented languages once they got a good handle on one of them, so they were confused about why people seem to think x years of experience in language y were so important.

I have mixed feelings about job postings that require a certain number of years of experience in any particular language. If you understand programming concepts (from low level stuff to how ifs and loops work to higher level stuff like how to keep your core business logic separate from presentation code) then yes, it’s pretty easy to apply those in whatever programming language you need to.

As a bit of an aside I think a lot of job postings are more of a wildest dreams wishlist than a useful description of what’s actually necessary to do the job from day to day. In the context of this particular question, I have a strong suspicion that when most job postings say the applicant needs “5 years of experience with Java” what they actually need is someone who knows Java and has 2-5 years of programming experience.

That said, while most programming concepts are transferable (especially if you’re using languages with broadly similar syntax), you really are more productive with a language you already know well, especially if you don’t have much programming experience. There are weird quirks of languages you may not run into at all until you’ve been working with them for a while, too.

For example, did you know in Java String.substring() used to return a “view” of the original string, not a completely separate string? And that since Java 1.7 update 6 it returns a completely separate string? Yes, that seems really minor but it can cause some weird weird bugs if you change the original string thinking it’s completely separate from the substring. And because stuff like that doesn’t look wrong, it can be absolutely miserable to track down.

Just because I technically can code in languages other than Java doesn’t mean I can do it quickly. When I need to do any front end work I spend a lot of time looking things up because I don’t remember the exact parameters basic string operations take in Javascript. If I had to write Javascript all the time I would start remembering those details, but that’s with a foundation of years of programming experience to start from. If you’re a new dev who just graduated from college/university/bootcamp, you’re going to have a harder time learning a new language because you’re also going to be learning professional programming at the same time.

Which language you learn first also makes a big difference in how hard of a time you have learning to code. In general I think you should start with whatever language lets you build stuff you’re excited about, but I don’t want to pretend all languages are equally beginner friendly either. C and C++ are good for many things but they are not your friends :) Python and Ruby are easier to pick up because they take care of fiddly details like memory management for you, and Javascript can be a good first language because you don’t need any special programs like IDEs or compilers at all, you can write it in notepad and run it in your browser.

So given all of that, why do (some) employers make such a big deal about language specific positions? Because if you don’t already understand programming really well, you need some way to find people who have a decent chance of succeeding in the position you want to fill. Sadly, not all job postings are written by people who understand the day to day work so it’s not unusual to end end up with some poor HR person’s best guess at what’s needed.

“5 years of Java experience” can also be a pretty decent proxy for “actually likes working with Java and won’t ditch us in a year to work in [cool new language of the week]”. Some languages are just not considered cool and plenty of people have a perfectly legitimate dislike of the amount of boilerplate you have to write to make Java do much of anything, so it makes sense to look for people who are willing to work with your tech stack for the long term (or at least the longer than one year term).

Readers, what do you think of stuff like “must have 5 years of Java experience” in job postings?

Dealing with imperfect requirements

in development, requirements

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A very common question developers ask is what they can do about bad requirements. The internet definitely needs more opinions on it, so here’s mine!

The first thing you’ve got to do is accept you will never get perfect requirements. If anyone knew how to get perfect requirements every time no matter how large the feature was, you would know their name because they would be deservedly famous for finally fixing the requirements problem. Outside of school assignments, the requirements you get are practically always going to be incomplete in some way and probably wrong in at least one way too. It’s frustrating, I’m not going to lie, but that’s just how the job works.

I’m stressing that point so much because I want you to have realistic expectations about how much you can possibly improve your requirements gathering process. If you go in thinking you can ever get perfect requirements every time, you’re just going to be disappointed. On the other hand, if you have more realistic expectations about what kind of improvements you can make, you’ll end up a lot happier with your progress.

Now that I’ve gotten the disclaimer part of this post out of the way, there are some things you can do when you get incomplete requirements or when you work with people who often change their minds about what they want.

First of all ask questions! I touched on this briefly in my post about how communication can make you a better programmer, but it bears repeating. Communicating well is absolutely essential to being a professional programmer, and one of the many reasons it’s so important is that you need to make sure you completely understand the requirements before you build something. Don’t worry about looking stupid, ask questions about anything that you’re not sure you completely understand. Unless you work in a terrible toxic company, nobody is going to be mad that you cared enough about doing a good job to make sure you didn’t accidentally build the wrong thing.

Asking questions can get you quite a ways and is definitely worth doing, but it’s not always enough. Another really useful technique is mockups. When people can see an example and compare it to what they already have, they’ll understand it far better and will be able to give you much better direction about what they really need. It’s a lot of work for the human brain to have to imagine what the finished thing will look like, how it will work, and how you will use it all at the same time. Take a little cognitive load off of your requirements people by asking them to imagine fewer things and you’ll get better results.

There are tons of tools out there for mocking up UI, if nothing else you can throw together a quick slide deck or build a couple simple pages in HTML. Don’t forget to take a lot of notes when you walk your requirements people through your mockup, you’re working with a limited human brain too and you’re not going to remember every detail of the feedback they give you without notes.

After you’ve made some mockups and walked people through them, you may want to build a prototype before building the real feature. Once people can actually use something, it becomes real to people in a way written requirements just aren’t. It’s not because they’re dumb or bad at requirements, that’s just how humans work. Building a prototype will also bring up all the technicaly questions you didn’t realize weren’t answered in the requirements until you started building the feature. Don’t pretend you’re perfect at requirements either :)

There’s another really useful technique for gathering requirements, but unlike questions, mockups, and prototypes, it takes more buy-in from your requirements person or people. That technique is user stories (you may encounter some confusion about use cases and user stories, which seem to be similar but not quite the same thing. I just found out when I was looking for a good link to explain further that the things we call use cases at work, other people call user stories).

To very briefly define user stories, they’re a particular way of stating requirements. The general form is: as a_____ I want to _____  so I can_____. For example: as a blogger, I want to schedule posts for the future so my posts go up on a consistent schedule. It’s amazing what comes up when you think about what you users want to accomplish and why. That kind of context is really important to understand the intent of the feature, but it does take more work on the part of the person who comes up with your requirements and writes them down.

It’s pretty common for people to see all this question asking and mockup making and user story writing as a waste of time that just slows down development. If you’re willing to put in the effort, it can really help to record just how much development time gets wasted because the requirements are bad or get changed all the time. Developer time is really expensive, showing your manager exactly how much developer time gets wasted on building the wrong thing then throwing it out when you get better requirements will likely convince them that it’s worth putting a few more hours into getting better requirements.

Requirements are fundamentally a hard problem you can do everything right and still get a horrible surprise when you’re halfway through building a feature. Like everything else in development, there’s no silver bullet.

Back to basics: advanced Java generics

in back to basics, development, generics

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Last time I mentioned that there are bounded generic types and wildcards. I’ve never actually used one of those if I remember correctly, which I why I left them for a followup post.

Bounded generics are really cool – they let you narrow down which types you can use with a generic class or method while still having the flexibility to work with different types in the range you’ve defined. There are lower bounded and upper bounded generics. Upper bounded generics specify a superclass your generic type must extend and lower bounded generics specify a class your generic class must be a superclass of.

This means that you can do more interesting stuff with your generic param because you know something about what it is. Let’s use WordPress as an example. If you had a theme superclass (or probably an interface) that was extended or implemented by, say, oneColumnTheme, twoColumnTheme, gridLayout, etc you could have a theme preview page that accepts anything that extends the base theme class and calls getPreviewImage and getDescription on every item passed in, even if they’re different subclasses.

That method signature would look like:

public Result createPreviewPage(List<? extends Theme> themeList) {
    //code goes here
}

You can’t add anything except null to a collection that has an upper bounded generic type, though. Why? Java inheritance – if you have a class hierarchy of Vehicle -> Car -> Sedan -> Toyota Corolla then that Toyota is definitely a Sedan, a Car, and a Cehicle, but a Vehicle could very well be a Motorcycle or a Bus, not any variety of Car.

On the lower bounded end of bounded generics, you could have a method that takes anything that’s a superclass of integer (which could be a number or object) and adds all the numbers from 1 to 10 to it. Yes, I stole this example (and the following code) from the official docs. The code for that method looks like:

public static void addNumbers(List<? super Integer> list) {
    for (int i = 1; i &lt;= 10; i++) {
        list.add(i);
    }
}

With a collection with a lower bounded type you can add things. Taking my Vehicle -> Toyota Corolla class hierarchy above, if you have a List<? super ToyotaCorolla> then you know what the most specific thing it can be is so you can safely add one of those.

You have have a lower bound or an upper bound but not both. You can have neither, though! That’s called an unbounded wildcard and it looks like:

public boolean removeAll(Collection<?> c);

That’s from the List source code. Unbounded wildcards are for when you really just don’t care what the thing is and when you want to make sure you don’t make any major changes to your parameter. The only thing you can do with a Collection<?> is add null, you just don’t know enough about what’s in there to add an object or any sort.

In my admittedly limited experience with bounded generics, upper bounded generics are much more common so you shouldn’t be too worried if you can’t find a use for a lower bounded generic parameter. If you’re not sure when to use which kind of wildcard/bounded generic, there’s a handy guide in the official docs. There are also some really in-depth articles about generics here and here if you’d like much, much more detail :)

Back to basics: Java generics

in back to basics, development, generics, java

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Every so often you’ve got to go back to basics no matter how long you’ve been doing something. It’s amazing how much you forget when you haven’t done something in a while, even if it’s kind of a core feature of a language you use all the time. Like Generics in Java!

So let’s talk about Generics. First of all, what is a Generic? It’s just a placeholder for a type. Where you would normally put a concrete type like String or Integer, you can put T instead.

Why should we care, though?

In short, because class cast exceptions are a pain to deal with. Back in the dark time before Java 5, you could put any object you wanted in a Collection but for that to work with Java’s type system, all of the Collections classes had to work with Objects. That meant you could put anything in, but when you got it out all Java knew was that it was an Object, so you had to know what to cast it to to use it for anything interesting.

As a bit of an aside: yes you can use arrays (not to be confused with ArrayLists) to avoid dealing with casting, but then you miss out on all the handy stuff Collections do for you, like automatically resizing themselves when you add more items. Collections for the win!

Compared to having to resize arrays manually, having to cast your objects back to the object you really wanted when you take them out of a Collection doesn’t sound so bad, but here’s the big problem with that: what if you mess up somewhere along the line and try to cast that object to something it can’t be cast to? Then you get a ClassCastException, which is really irritating because it’s a runtime exception (I should write a post about exception handling in Java shouldn’t I) for something the compiler shouldn’t have let you do in the first place. Not finding out your code is wrong in a totally predictable way until you run it sucks.

Generics to the rescue! With Generics, you can tell a collection what kind of things go in it when you create it, and then not have to do any casts when you take them out because you can only put one (depending on how you count subclasses) type of thing in there.

Okay great, but how do you actually use Generics?

If you just want to put things in a Collection and get them back out, it’s really simple. In general using existing code that uses Generics is super easy.

List<String> names = new ArrayList<>();
names.add("Amy");
names.add("Brianna");
names.add("Cara");

String name = names.get(0);

While I’m at it the <> operator (aka the diamond operator) is great. Before Java 7 you had to specify the whole type in both the declaration and instantiation, which kinda sucked if you needed, say a Map<String, List<ReallyLongTypeHere>>.

Where things get a little more complicated is writing your own code using Generics. There are two places you can put generic types, on the class declaration and on the method declaration and the really fun part is you can put different types in each place. You could put a different generic type on each method if you wanted to, but that would probably be evil so don’t do it :)

Let’s look at the List source code for an example:

public interface List<E> extends Collection<E> {
    int size();
    boolean isEmpty();
    boolean add(E e);
    E get(int index);
    <T> T[] toArray(T[] a);
}

FYI that’s a tiny subset of all the methods on the List interface, I just didn’t want to list a ton of methods that aren’t relevant to this post.

When you put a generic type like E on the class (or interface!) declaration, what you’re saying is that this class primarily deals with Es. That way when you use the same generic in methods like add and get, it’s obvious what’s going on.

Why E instead of any other letter? It’s short for element. This post has a nice list of the naming conventions for generic types. I can’t link directly to that section, so just search for “naming convention” and you’ll find it.

The toArray method declaration shows how you can use another generic type just for one method even if the class already has a generic type. The <T> just means that method takes a generic type T, it’s separate from the return value. Basically, every time you use a generic type, you’ve got to have a <T> (or <E>, or <N>, etc) somewhere so Java knows you’re using a generic and doesn’t go looking for a class named T.

One thing that’s a little tricky with generic types is getting their Class object. You need a Class for things like using Jackson to convert Json into an object in your system, but you can’t do E.class. Luckily, there’s a way around that, you can use Class<E> like so:

//here's an example method using a generic Class
public static <T> T decode(String json, Class<T> destinationClass) { //code goes here }

//and here's how you call it
Result decoded = decodeUtil.decode(myString, Result.class);

I forgot about Class<T> once and made a real mess of my code, but at least you get to learn from my mistakes. A good rule of thumb for using generics is that if you still need to cast anything, something is wrong.

There are a bunch more fancy things you can do with bounded generic types and wildcards, but I’ll get to those in another post. What I’ve covered in this post is the majority of what you’re likely to need to do with Generics, you’ll need to get a handle on this stuff anyway before the advanced stuff makes sense.

What does reasoning about code even mean?

in development, how does it work?

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Programmers talk about “reasoning about code” all the time, but what does that actually mean? Is it really just pretending to be a CPU and working out exactly when your for loop ends?

Yes and no. Figuring out exactly what your loops are up to is part of it, but at a higher level it’s also about how your methods, objects, modules, functions all work together. Like this stackoverflow answer says, writing code isn’t just about cranking out something that compiles, you’ve also got to be able to figure out if it’s actually right, if it performs well enough, if it can be scaled, if it’s vulnerable to bad data (whether that’s malicious or accidental).

Sadly, tools can only help you so much with everything that comes after getting your code to compile. The compiler can tell you whether your code will run, but it can’t tell you if it does what you meant. Automated tests are a huge help with that, but those tests are code themselves and you also need to be able to reason about them to make sure you’re testing what you meant to test and that the test itself isn’t broken.

To figure out what your code is doing, you need to be able to read and understand it well enough that you can predict what it will do for any given input. That’s basically all “reasoning about code” is. If you can reason about your code, you can change it or add more features without breaking things or spending hours and hours cursing at your computer and howling “whyyyyy won’t this work?!”

So being able to reason about your code is really useful, but how do you do it? Practice, mostly. If you’re a beginner programmer you should not worry even a little bit about understanding a whole codebase or heck, even a whole class. Focus on one method or one loop or one if statement at a time. When you get enough practice, you’ll be able to understand those really quickly and you can move up a level to figuring out what a whole method does with different inputs or how two methods in the same class work together.

Oh, and it really helps if the code you’re trying to reason about is good code (that is, well organized, has good names, etc). Some code is next to impossible to reason about because it’s full of giant methods or the variable names aren’t helpful at all or, and this is one of the worst problems, variables change all the time in unpredictable ways. A “total” variable that changes value each time through a loop isn’t so bad, it’s clear what it’s for and why it changes. On the other hand a “total” variable that gets reused for completely different totals at different places in a method is a real problem. Humans can only hold so many things in their working memory at once and “wait where does total change again?” takes up most of them. If you have a terrible time reasoning about a certain piece of code, it’s entirely possible the problem is not you but the code.

In cases like that when I don’t have time to refactor the code so it’s easier to read I find it really helpful to make a lot of notes and draw myself a map through the code. If you want to be really helpful you can even type up your notes / make a diagram out of your map and add it to your developer documentation.

Reasoning about code can be hard to do and takes practice, but it’s not some sort of magic that only “real” programmers can do.

How does a thread work, anyway?

in development

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Threads are used a lot in java, so I should probably understand how they actually work. They’re one of those things you use all the time without thinking about what’s really happening under the covers. I know threads and processes are related, but not exactly how.

First of all, what’s a process? To understand threads inside a process you need to understand processes first.

A process is an individual thing that’s separate from all the other processes running on your computer. In most cases a process is a single program running on your computer, but some programs have many processes – Chrome, for example, has a process for each tab. To quote the official tutorial on concurrency in Java: “A process has a self-contained execution environment. A process generally has a complete, private set of basic run-time resources; in particular, each process has its own memory space.” As I understand it, the separate memory space is the really important part of a process – this keeps processes from overwriting each other’s memory, crashing your computer, and wrecking your day.

Threads, on the other hand, are just parts of the parent process that execute semi-separately and all use the same memory. This means they can change a variable another thread just set, cause wildly bizarre bugs, and wreck your day. Every process has at least one thread, but can have more.

Okay, so why would you want to use threads when you could use processes to keep everything separate? Because processes use up a lot more system resources than threads, it’s more work to get them to communicate with each other, and they’re just overkill for a lot of problems. If you’re building in a search feature in your app and you want to search by a few different things (like name, address, and ID number) from one search box, creating a whole process for each search is way more work than you need to do when you could just use threads. Do you really want to write a whole separate program for each search? I sure don’t.

So threads are convenient, but what are they really? Saying they’re a single thread of execution through a program is all well and good, but what does that really mean? To quote stackoverflow: “A thread is a basic unit of CPU utilization; it comprises a thread ID, a program counter, a register set, and a stack.” Those things are also called the execution context, because they’re everything you need to know about the executing program to stop it and start it again in exactly the same state it was in. The CPU does that a lot so it can appear to do two things at once (if you have a multicore processor, it actually can do more than one thing at once). If one thread is waiting for data to come back from the database, which takes forever from the perspective of a CPU, the CPU will essentially make a note of where the thread got to in the code and what values all of its variables had, then start executing another thread using the “notes” it made about that one.

Because threads all share the same address space, they can share information really easily by updating global variables. In a process, a memory address (aka a variable) will probably mean nothing to another process. In a thread, any variable that’s in scope can be used and (if it’s not final) changed. This is really handy for stuff like web programming – if a thread that’s handling a particular HTTP request needs a reference to the database service, it can just grab one from the controller/servlet/general parent object that contains methods for handling individual requests.

When a thread completes, its variables get garbage collected as usual (assuming nothing else has a reference to them), you don’t have to do anything special to clean up after it.

And finally, while the tutorial I linked above talks about Thread objects and Runnables, in modern Java you mostly use CompletableFutures and let them handle starting and stopping threads for you.

Let’s play CPU!

in development, learning

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I think one of many reasons it’s so hard to learn to code is that the people doing the teaching have all forgotten what it was like not to know how to code, so we skip over some really important basic steps because we think they’re inherently obvious. Case in point, this poor redditor who nobody ever taught how to work through a piece of code with a pencil and paper. I had to read the question a couple of times to understand what they were even asking, it just didn’t occur to me that someone wouldn’t know how to trace through code manually.

The example that user posted was “x=0; y=0 While (x<7) { x=y-x; y=x+x; x= x+ y + 1;}”

First of all, let’s clean that up a little:

x=0;
y=0;
while (x < 7) {
    x = y - x;
    y = x + x;
    x = x + y + 1;
}

In the beginning x is 0, which is definitely less than 7 so we enter the loop.

Inside the loop, take each statement and swap out the variables for their current values and then do the math and put that value in the variable:

x = y – x becomes x = 0 – 0 becomes x = 0
y = x + x becomes y = 0 + 0 becomes y = 0
x = x + y + 1 becomes x = 0 + 0 + 1 becomes x = 1
At the end of the loop x = 1 and y = 0

Now we check the condition at the top of the loop again and x is still less than 7 so we go through the loop again

x = y – x becomes x = 0 – 1 becomes x = -1
y = x + x becomes y = -1 + -1 becomes y = -2
x = x + y + 1 becomes x = -1 + -2 + 1 becomes x = -2
At the end of the loop x = -2 and y = -2

At this point, I’m getting very suspicious this loop will never exit. I don’t think x is ever going to be greater than or equal to 7, but just to be sure let’s go through the code one more time

x is still less than 7 so we go through the loop again

x = y – x becomes x = -2 – -2 becomes x = 0
y = x + x becomes y = 0 + 0 becomes y = 0
x = x + y + 1 becomes x = 0 + 0 + 1 becomes x = 1

At the end of the loop x = 1 and y = 0. These are the same values we had after we went through the loop the first time, so now we can be completely sure the loop never ends. After each time through the loop x is either 1 or -2, there’s no way for it ever to be 7 or more.

That’s it. Working through code with a pencil and paper is just keeping track of what values all of your variables have and swapping out variables for their values. It’s really tedious, that’s why we make computers do it :) And to be clear, you’re never expected to be able to work through complicated code like that purely in your head. Everybody else needs a pencil and paper too, there are just too many details to keep them all in your working memory.

Okay, so if working through code with a pencil and paper sucks so much, why does anyone do it? Because it gives you a really solid understanding of what the computer is doing, which you’ll need later when you start building more complicated things. For a simple loop like the one above you can just throw that snippet of code into an IDE, run it, and see what happens, but you can’t even start building bigger things without a foundation of knowing what the computer is doing when it runs your code.

Repetition is underrated

in development, learning, opinion, unsolicited advice

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The more I read about the struggles beginner programmers have and the more I mentor at Ladies Learning Code workshops, the more I think that repetition is seriously underrated when it comes to teaching anything technical.

When you’re learning a language or an instrument or a sport or a physical skill like plumbing or carpentry or even math, which is similar to programming in a lot of ways, you expect to have to repeat the same thing multiple times before you remember all the details and get it right every time, but somehow when you’re learning to code we assume you should only need to be told how a for loop works once and you’ll understand it perfectly right away and remember it forever. That’s just not how our brains work and that’s why I think repetition is so underrated.

It is completely normal to need to write a lot of for loops before you get it right every time. Some people do pick up programming concepts very quickly but that doesn’t mean you’re dumb or abnormal if it takes you longer. Something like a for loop (or anything programming construct) seems simple once you understand it, but there are actually an enormous number of fiddly little details you have to keep track of to get your loop to work. You know what’s a great way to learn all of those details so thoroughly you hardly even think about them anymore? That’s right, repetition!

Programming isn’t just a matter of understanding the concepts, you’ve also got to learn them so thoroughly you don’t have to think about how to write a loop, you just write one when you need it. Without that thorough of an understanding, programming is like trying to speak another language by looking up each word individually in your [other language] to English dictionary. That’s one way to learn, but you’ll probably just be miserable and frustrated and forget what you were trying to say in the first place before you’re even halfway through your sentence.

Come to think of it, maybe the kind of drills you do when you’re learning a language could help people learn to program without spending so much time worrying that they’re just not smart enough.

Anyway, repetition is seriously underrated and I wish we collectively talked more about how much practice it takes just to pick up the basics of programming, let alone the complicated stuff like deciding how to structure your code or what to name things (still one of the hardest problems in programming :) ) I think a lot of programming tutorials assume that you know you need to practice without explicitly saying it or without making it clear just how much practice you need. I have to admit I wouldn’t want to write pages and pages of very similar programming exercises either, but it’s not so hard just to say that programming takes practice and you’ll probably need to go through the tutorial a few times before it sticks.

If you did a tutorial or a workshop just once and didn’t instantly become a good programmer, congratulations, you’re normal! If you keep at it, you’ll get there.

Let the computer do it for you

in best practices, development, tools

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Many years ago when I was in college, a friend taught me something that’s been really useful for my whole career. That lesson was to let the computer do it for you. Unless there’s a compelling reason to do things the hard way, just let the computer make things easier for you.

Learning lisp? Get a plugin for your text editor or a simple IDE like Dr Racket that matches your parens for you.

Working with fixed width files? Get Record Editor, it’ll save you so much time!

Fighting with javascript? Get WebStorm! Seriously, it’s freaking amazing.

If you have to do something tedious and fiddly, get the computer to help you. That’s what it’s good at. There is a tool out there that will make your life easier, you just have to go and look for it. The hard part is remembering to go look for it :)

It’s normal to think that if there was a tool you could use your teacher or your boss or someone on your team would have told you about it, but thinking to look for tools like that is surprisingly unusual. And to be fair, it can be a real timesink to try tool after tool just to find out none of them are better than what you’re already using.

That said, if someone on your team hasn’t already told you that they’ve tried everything they could find (and searched for tools recently), it’s worth doing at least a little Googling and seeing if there’s already a tool that would make your life easier. Other people use lisp, you can safely assume there are tools out there for it. Other people use fixed width files, you can safely assume there are tools for those too. And tons of other people use javascript, tools for that are getting better all the time.

If there isn’t already a tool, you might be able to build one. That’s exactly what bash or powershell scripting is for – fiddly things that humans are bad at and tedious but simple things that humans just don’t wanna do. If you’ve ever run a build script, you’ve used a custom tool that someone wrote to automate building your application so it gets done the exact same way every single time. No matter what OS you’re running, there will be other scripts out on the internet that you can take apart to build your own custom tools.

Whether you find tools or build your own, remember that boring stuff is the computer’s job!

Rich Hickey – Hammock Driven Development

in becoming a better programmer, development, problem solving

Somewhat related image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

A little while ago a friend of mine shared this list of Talks that changed the way I think about programming in one of the many Slacks I’m in and I finally started watching them.

Here’s my recap of one of the talks from that list, Hammock Driven Development by Rich Hickey. In it he describes his process for solving hard problems, which is obviously a huge part of what programmers do and is probably useful for just about anyone else too. There are a couple of technical examples in the talk but almost all of it should make sense to a non-programmer.

I put numbers on these steps to make this blog post easier to follow, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow this process in this exact order. The first couple of steps really do need to happen first, but after that you may want to iterate over the remaining steps a few times and possibly even go back to the beginning to make sure that you really do understand your problem in the context of all the new stuff you’ve learned while you were trying to solve it.

Step 1: state the problem. Say it out loud, talk with team member about it, write it down if nothing else.

Step 2: understand the problem. What do you know already (facts, context, constraints)? What don’t you know? For example, if you know you will need input data, where does it come from? if the primary source goes down, is there a secondary? Are there related problems? Hint: there are. Your problem is almost certainly not unique in the history of the world. And if you’re going to bother to figure all that stuff out, write it down!

Step 3: be discerning. Not everything is awesome! Look for problems in your proposed solutions and try to solve those too right away up front. Do you think there aren’t any tradeoffs in your proposed solution? Not likely, it’s much more likely you’re missing something. You should have questions – nobody knows everything! If you don’t have questions, you’re missing something. Write all this stuff down too.

Step 4: more input better output. You can’t connect things you don’t know about. Read in and around your space (not just your exact problem, also similar stuff so that you can let that simmer and let your brain make connections). Look (critically!) at other solutions too. Great solutions can come from tearing apart someone else’s idea.

Step 5: tradeoffs. Everybody says design is about tradeoffs, but you need to look at at least two possible solutions and figure out what’s good and bad about those things before you can really say you made a tradeoff. Write this down too! You may be seeing a theme here :)

Step 6: focus. This is where the hammock comes in. One of the great things about the hammock is that if you lie down with your eyes closed, no one knows you’re not sleeping and they won’t bother you because you might be sleeping so you can focus completely on your problem without interruptions. The computer is a prime source of distractions – you need to get away from the computer if you want to focus. You can’t do everything – if you really focus on something you’ll drop other balls like returning phone calls or emails, or remembering to run that errand or fix that bug you said would be really quick. Let your loved ones know what you’re doing and why you’re not going to be super responsive for a while (as an aside I really liked this point about treating people who matter to you as if they, you know, matter to you). An interesting detail Rich includes in this step is that you should close your eyes to really focus – at this point you’re not looking for any external input at all

Rich has a bunch of interesting stuff to say about what he calls your waking mind and your background mind (in the Leaning How to Learn course they call it focused and diffuse modes of attention, if you’ve taken that course this will all be pretty familiar). He uses his waking mind to assign tasks to his background mind and to analyze it’s products. Your background mind is where you solve most non-trivial problems but you can only feed it, not direct it. You need to spend enough time thinking about something for it to become an agenda item for your background mind to get anything useful from it.

Step 6 has two substeps, loading up your background mind and then letting it work. To load up your background mind you review everything you wrote down in the previous steps and really focus on it. Because your waking mind can only keep track of so many pieces of information at once (7 +- 2, as far as I know), you need to have written everything you know about your problem down so you can swap those pieces back into your working memory when you need them. To load all of this into your background mind you need to survey everything you’ve written down to give your background mind the chance to make connections between different things that your working mind didn’t realize could be connected. Rich stresses that you can’t do this at the computer, you need to go somewhere and have no external input. He recommends going somewhere you can close your eyes but not go to sleep so you can sort of switch your brain from external to internal input(all that information about your problem that you just reviewed).

The other substep is to leave the problem alone for a while and let your background mind do its thing. Sleep is a great way to do this, or going for a walk, or anything that gets your waking mind off of the problem. If you’re working on a hard problem you should sleep on it for at least one night, more if it’s a really hard problem. Just because you have an idea right away doesn’t mean you won’t have a better one in the morning. And once you have an idea, analyze it, don’t just run with it. Just because you slept on it doesn’t mean that solution that popped into your head in the morning is perfect.

Optional step 7: don’t stay stuck. If you have another problem to work on, do that when you feel stuck instead of just sitting there and staying stuck. If you don’t have another problem or really need to stay focused on your current one, gather more input, talk with more people if you can, and go through the whole process again.

A caveat to this whole process is that if you do have more than one problem you’re working on, you may spend hours loading up all the information about one problem and wake up the next morning with the answer to a different problem. That’s a thing you just have to accept, brains are funny sometimes. If you can’t switch to the other problem, at least write down the solution you came up with before going back into gathering information and loading it up for the problem you really want to solve.

Rich’s talk is really good and I highly recommend watching it yourself, but if you don’t have 40 minutes to dedicate to sitting in front of your computer then I hope this recap was helpful.